I’ve had many blogs and social accounts over the years, none of them updated regularly. I write a lot of emails, requirements, designs etc. in my job, as well as private thoughts in my journal. I haven’t written anything public in a long time. I’m intentionally starting from scratch with a simple blogging platform (Hugo) – not trying to import past blogs (https://programcsharp.com), not trying to set up a bigger system and letting that suck up effort.
I could have used a hosted blog software and saved even more time, but I’m a nerd at heart and tinkering is what gets me going, so Hugo was a good tradeoff. Took a couple hours to get set up, and here I am writing in a plain text Markdown file in GitHub and this will be posted to my blog once I publish. Soon I’ll make publishing automatic on commit, and document the process.
Writing things down is what lets you document things and progress in your thinking. Without writing, it’s tough to see what changed over time. It’s easy to hold thoughts in your mind that appear to be solid but wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny if they were written down. The short size and ephemeral nature of social media contributes to this as well – it’s all point in time, now now now, rather than building a body of work. Sure, you can scroll back in your feed to see what happened last year, but who ever does that?
This is intentionally long form content. I’m pushing myself to write more and write regularly. I’m not going to commit the cardinal sin of “hey guys, haven’t posted in awhile but now I’ll be more regular”. I’m doing this for me, not anybody else, not for the ‘gram, not for traffic. I’m not going to share this blog with anybody or even submit it to Google until I have a history of regular posting under my belt.
I’m also going to keep these entries short and focus on consistency rather than length.